Crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM) is a specialized form of photosynthesis that greatly increases water-use efficiency by taking up CO2 through stomata that are open at night (when evapotranspiration is low). Engineering plants that can switch to CAM during periods of drought is a key goal towards improving agricultural water efficiency, but how CAM plants achieve the unusual temporal activity patterns of metabolic enzymes and the corresponding metabolites has remained uncertain. Abraham et al. compared RNA, protein and metabolite temporal patterns between Agave (a CAM plant) and Arabidopsis (a C3 plant). Amongst their findings was a rescheduling of expression of core ABA signalling genes involved in stomatal functions. Nature Plants. 10.1111/tpj.13429